I've been working on this project for a period a little over three years. While a translation guide has existed, no one had actually hacked the game yet. Thishack covers about 60% of the game in terms of translating. Just about everything left to translate involves compressed tiles and unfortunately there is virtually no documentation for the system regarding this.

So I've been a huge fan of the Klonoa franchise since I was young, which was why I was drawn to this title. I was partly inspired to try out rom hacking from Slowbeef (notably of Retsupurae and 'Let's Plays' in general). I've also previously done translations for a couple manga.

I got my start reading a few documents from this site about creating tables and relative searching. I eventually figured out the table and started by replacing most of the Japanese alphabet with a new English font and then changed the text to English wording. I used Tile Molester Pro for tile extraction/insertion and Translhextion for hex editing. Mednafen was my emulator of choice, and its debugger helped me find where the compressed tiles for the 'Best Time' katakana on the level select was located.

The main issue I encountered was how the Wonderswan puts together different tiles. Alot of the tiles show 'smearing artifacts' (notably on menus and the cutscene font) when reinserted and I'm not sure what causes this.

A huge help came from one of the game's features of saving the last room you were in and letting you continue it from the title screen. This allowed me to easily make changes to the rom and then continue without having to play an entire level over again, notably for the end of world cutscenes.

Credits were pretty straightforward, although it took a few hours.The level select screen took a little longer to make sure the new tiles matched closely to the original background.

Despite it being still incomplete, I'm very proud of the work I accomplished.

I also added the original Japanese and new English tables to the archive above.

Nice to see someone else working on WonderSwan games! I have a partially translated version of this game kicking around somewhere - I'll see if I can dig up my documentation. If it's got anything in there that'd be useful to you, I'd be happy to share.

Edit: As far as the cut-scene font's artifacts, you have it shifted by one. If you move everything so it looks right at 0002D9DF instead of 0002D9E0, it'll fix that.

Edit 2: Same thing with the menus. Shift the graphics up by one, and they'll look fine.

I took the advice from above and finally got around to shifting the alphabet by -1, looks great now. Unfortunately some of the menu prompts don't slide correctly without weird stuff happening so I'm not going to touch those for now.

Create a romhacking page if you don't want the hack lost to the ages like several others have been. It's not that hard, even if you have to create the game page, and once done corrections can be done by others.

Create a romhacking page if you don't want the hack lost to the ages like several others have been. It's not that hard, even if you have to create the game page, and once done corrections can be done by others.

I thought WIPs weren't allowed to have pages, unless you mean the Abandoned page.

Update: Just noticing now there is an 'unfinished' section for Translations.